Freaky dimension
18th May 2006 by Silvia Cambie
Last week, I came accross an organisation that was trying to retain a communicators because their board had told them they needed to change their internal culture and talk more to the press. My first reaction was:Eh….are we on the same planet or have I, for some reason, entered some freaky dimension the moment I walked into your conference room?
Many times, communicators are expected to be magicians able to turn a dysfunctional outfit into an outgoing media champion. What some organisations do not understand is that if you do not have content, you will not have anything to tell journalists. A lot of people don’t seem to make this connection. They think that spokespersons are alchemists able to turn corporate platitutes into hot news material.
I have come accross this attitude so many times and it never fails to puzzle me. What is it that makes people think that it is enough to hire a spokesperson and all your problems (lack of strategy, management without vision, disenfranchised employees, etc.) will go away?
Anybody out there who has entered the same freaky dimension?
May 30th, 2006 at 5:00 am
Silvia, haven’t we all been there?
The old saying in product marketing is, “The quickest way to kill a bad product is to promote it heavily.”
Seems to apply here, too.
Every practitioner is in a different situation, of course, but I look on my role as one of giving management good advice, not of taking orders.
And that advice may well be, “Get your act together before the publicity kills you.”
If that approach costs me a bit of work now and then, as the disfunctional organization selects a competitor who assures them that “spin” can outweigh substance, then I leave with glee, knowing that I would never have been happy with the bad client, nor they with me.